Tuesday, December 11, 2018

Stephanie Strickland has published 8 books of poetry, most recently Dragon Logic and V: WaveTercets / Losing L’una, and 11 works of electronic literature. Zone : Zero, book + CD, includes the poem slippingglimpse which maps text to Atlantic wave patterns. Recent digital poems include House of Trust with Ian Hatcher and Hours of the Night with M.D. Coverley. A volume of New & Selected Poems, How the Universe Is Made, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2019. http://stephaniestrickland.com.

Her poems “e=mc2 : Not the Whole Story,” “Hum,” “Separation of Messages as a Form of Work,” “Black Glass Horizon,” “Solstice” and “Distaff Tech” appear in the nineteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “e=mc2 : Not the Whole Story,” “Hum,” “Separation of Messages as a Form of Work,” “Black Glass Horizon,” “Solstice” and “Distaff Tech.”

A: I can say that half of them are ancient (unfinished) poems that I suddenly felt called to readdress, as if their time had come, and half were written last summer, part of a possible chapbook, One Sentence to Save In a Cataclysm.

The older ones are “Hum” and “Separation of Messages as a Form of Work,” and “Solstice.”

“Hum” is a poem of rage and grief, oscillating perspectives.

“Separation of Messages as a Form of Work” treats a truth about coding and decoding quite off-handedly—and yet directly, namely that the message can persist. Which is to say that d s i d e r r o permutes to “disorder” (it also includes “désir,” “deseo,” etc.); and C. Shannon is both a citation, see Shannon, and his initial: Claude Shannon, 1916-2001, American mathematician, electrical engineer, cryptographer, “father of information theory”; and Cue E.D. is, of course, also q.e.d., E.D. being Emily Dickinson. “To simulate—is stinging work—” is from Dickinson 443. Between what you hear, what you see, and the number of layers you discern, requisite work reveals a (indeed, many) messages.

“Solstice” is a direct description of the winter solstice in my part of the world, a turning you think will never come.

Q: How does this compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: I am working on a number of these older poems, ones I only rediscovered when a journal solicited poems from me for a particular issue but did not allow multiply submitted ones.

Other current poems seem to come from a sense of possible cataclysm. I explore what kinds of writing I would want to save, or change, or rely on, in order to face this kind of unknown.

Many poets who write from/about/with science want to affect scientists. Others want to affect public perception. I share with Buckminster Fuller an urgent sense that new lexicon and syntax are required. First of all, because language based on ancient physics—the sun rises, the sun sets—does not convey, much less entrain, our current understandings of mathematics, measurement, or instrumentation. The second reason to re-create a lexicon is to make clear how a powerfully imposed science understanding directly affects social justice and all else.

“Distaff Tech” is a tribute to Maryam Mirzakani, an Iranian mathematician, the first woman to win a Fields Medal (the highest mathematical honor), who died of breast cancer at age 40. Her work explored multiple fields, but in particular questions of geometry and topology. She drew her thinking on large sheets of paper on the floor, working alongside her small daughter. The poem contrasts the opening spaces she envisioned with the knots classified by Morwen Thistlethwaite. It recounts many mathematical achievements of women, often not recognized as such at the time, and the distinctly different perspective the “distaff” contribution brought. It also suggests the danger of certain technological perspectives if they are not opposed by what seem to be “marginal” perspectives, marginal in this case on account of gender.

Q: I’m fascinated by the way you use space, whether with the individual line or word, or simply across the length and breadth of the page. Do you see this as a visual structure, or something akin to breath? Or possibly both (or neither)?

A: For me, a poem is always in motion, flying, floating, pausing, in space and across a spectrum: from internally spoken, to spoken aloud, to handwritten page, to printed page, to any one of various screens, to an interactive interface, to its place in a physical space of 3 dimensions, to hologrammatic space, to a virtual space of any number of dimensions. There is both a (breath) rhythm and a (visual) architecture at any point. I wanted my book True North to move around a pole of the 5 “True North” poems as if they formed a maypole. Still not possible! The print page is a kind of flash capture of a structure in motion. For me it should recall and be a prompt to its other possible forms and yet be firm enough to remain in the mind as an image.

The calligraphic or printed page has of course been deeply studied over centuries. I just read the magnificently produced essay-catalog for the Frankenstein exhibit at the Morgan. I realized that I had forgotten how rewarding a truly beautifully made book could be to read. A phone screen, by contrast, is a display tailored for ad banners and headlines.

Here is a flying poem that is also still in space and different for every walker:

Q: How do you approach reworking older poems? Are you simply picking up where you left off, or are you completely tearing apart and rebuilding from a different perspective?

A: These three were very close to their final form when I found them. I think I became more willing to accept them as they were and to know why I wrote them. In other cases, though, I have to do a lot more re-encountering to get my intuition or initial impulse adequately accommodated. Some poems are very resistant, yet I still understand what I wanted, just not how to do it. Some get extensively reworked and are usually shorter and shapelier.

Q: Your published work includes digital collaborations; how do your explorations through both digital and collaboration potentially affect the way you approach your solo text-based works?

A: My sense of the number of ways a poem can be expands with digital means. The affordances e-lit offers and the increasing number of forms it takes, as the technology changes, made a deep impression on me.

My digital collaborations are mostly of two kinds. Sometimes, someone else and I seem to have a kind of mind meld as we feel our way to the realization of a project that excites us both equally. These poems are usually based on texts I have written, but these change and become full in ways we both discover, and the process of joint discovery is intensely enjoyable. Other times, it is more of a negotiation to agree on the parameters of a project, and to discover together how the text will be generated or discovered or written or presented.

Preparing a poem for an installation, or as a performance piece integrated with music and dance, is also a very different kind of text work. Nothing is really “solo” when you think about it. You are always working within a positive and negative tradition and with what is happening in the world. I believe each modality of poetry does something none of the others can do, as well, but choosing or finding the most resonant way of working becomes in a way more difficult the more techniques you command. Some projects are so extensive that they require a crew of collaborators.

Q: How do you approach putting together a book-length manuscript? Are you working on individual poems that slowly begin to shape themselves into something larger, or are you working on a larger structure from the offset? How do your books even begin?

A: The answer is different for every book! Transitions between poems are always important, as well as the overall structure, which in simpler books is a through line. Strangely, How the Universe Is Made: Poems New & Selected, which is forthcoming in February, does have a through line, even though it is gathered from all the books and even describes the digital works. Dan Beachy-Quick says, “…the selections from the books are making their own true book, a traceable concern that widens and deepens … as it progresses.”

My first book, Give the Body Back, is a single sequence focused largely on historical women and women in my family. My next, The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil, is a tribute to the life and work of Weil. The way I acknowledged the welter of views about her—for some she is a mystic, for some a political activist, some see the philosopher, and I see her as a performance artist as well—was to structure the book so you could enter it at any point, read to the end and then turn to the beginning, always making a circle, but a different one depending where you started. The poems were titled in such a way that the table of contents is almost entirely alphabetic, resembling an index.

The next, True North, was a deeper encounter with both history and science, different forms of truth-seeking. As I said before, I saw the parts as streamers round a flag pole (which led me to attempt a digital version in very early beta software). The flag pole is made of the 5 “True North” poems which tell you how find true north using only stick and string. The streamer sections are The Mother-Lost World, Blue Planet Blues, Language Is a Cast of the Human Mind, Numbers Nesting In Numbers-Nesting-In-Numbers, and There Was an Old Woman.

The most adventurous organization was for V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una. It is two books in one, bound upside down to each other, with a website URL in the middle. You have to literally turn the book over and upside down and go online to get a complete view! Each section has a different numbering system, one is the usual and one is based on the U. S. government document numbering system. The Vniverse (Shockwave) website was developed together with the book and published simultaneously. The Losing L’una part also has a separate associated digital poem. The text for the WaveSon.nets was written in one concentrated interval, one long scroll of tercets. I organized it into 15-line “Son.nets” which do not necessarily start or end on a given page, but rather run on, in a wave of course. In 2014, this book was out of print and a small multimedia press, SpringGun, wanted to republish it. By then, in an era of web reading, I knew people would be comfortable with the original long scroll, and we presented that way with headers on each page designating which online constellation the tercets belong to. Called V: WaveTercets / Losing L’una, this book has an accompanying iPad app constructed with Ian Hatcher, in software very different from Shockwave. In this app, you can draw your own constellations, and there is an Oracle.

The next book, Zone : Zero, was published with a CD and incorporates the text version of two digital poems, Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot and slippingglimpse. It is also organized in 5 parts: Zone ARMORY War, Zone MOAT Else, Zone DUNGEON Body, Zone RAMPART Logic, and Zone MOTE Else. Finally, Dragon Logic, all text! But still in sections: e-Dragons, Sea Dragons, Hunger Dragons of Unstable Ruin, Dragon Maps, Alive Inside the Dragons, Codemakers, and Afterword.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

Thursday, November 29, 2018

Ken Hunt’s writing has appeared in Penteract, The Blasted Tree, No Press, Freefall, Matrix Magazine, and in the anthology The Calgary Renaissance. His first book of poetry, Space Administration, was published in 2014 by the LUMA Foundation. Ken has two books of poetry forthcoming from BookThug: The Lost Cosmonauts (in 2018) and The Odyssey (in 2019). Ken also has a book of poetry forthcoming in 2020, from The University of Calgary Press, entitled The Manhattan Project. For three years, Ken served as managing editor of NōD Magazine, and for one year, he served as poetry editor of filling Station. In 2014, Ken founded Spacecraft Press, an online publication venue for experimental writing inspired by science and technology. Ken holds an MA in English from Concordia University, and is a PhD candidate at Western University in London, Ontario.

A: These four poems are excerpted from my current poetry manuscript-in-progress, Project Blue Book. The book investigates the UFO phenomenon, its surrounding subcultures, its related conspiracy theories, and its status as a kind of ‘modern mythology’.

The drop poem “UNCLASSIFIED” refers to conspiracy theories that claim NASA has withheld information about its space programs and missions from the public. Some claim that this withheld information deals with extraterrestrial encounters. Others claim, infamously, that this withheld information would prove that one or more of the Apollo space missions were hoaxes designed to act as pro-American Cold War propaganda.

The title of the poem “The Autokinetic Effect” refers to a hallucinatory phenomenon often experienced by fighter pilots, where stationary dots of light outside the aircraft appear to move. This phenomenon is often cited as an explanation for UFO sightings reported by fighter pilots.

The title of the poem “Sleep Paralysis” refers to a common explanation for abduction experiences. Each line in this poem is lifted, verbatim, from abduction narratives written by abductees. In particular, only lines beginning with “they” were selected.

Finally, “The Klass Curse” is a condemnation of the stubbornness and gullibility of UFO conspiracy theorists, made by the late journalist and skeptic Philip J. Klass, which I have repurposed, verbatim, as a found poem.

Q: How do these poems fit in with some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: These poems incarnate my continuing interest in writing poetry that responds to the sciences. I suppose the poems (or rather Project Blue Book as a whole) are similar to my forthcoming manuscripts (The Lost Cosmonauts, The Odyssey, and The Manhattan Project), in that each book represents a link in a kind of chain of texts that I’m in the process of producing. In addition to pursuing a PhD thesis that investigates examples of related works of poetry from the latter half of the 20th century to the present, I find myself compelled to add my own works to the canon as well, in order to address subjects that haven’t yet received the level of poetic attention that I think their continuing sociocultural impact warrants.

Out of the poetry published each year, and out of the catalogue of poetry written over the course of the past few decades, relatively few books have engaged in significant ways with scientific language, events, and ideas. Books that have done so have largely gone unnoticed, relative to books of poetry that have engaged with other subjects.

Like the stereotypical group of nerds inventing intricate D&D narratives in a dim room, I get the sense that many poets with an interest in responding to the sciences with their work (whether they are part of a group of likeminded peers or not), end up ostracized, or perhaps ostracize themselves intentionally in response to an all-too-familiar expectation that little to no understanding, let alone attention, will come their way, despite their best efforts.

I want not only to bring academic attention to the bridges being built (rather than burned) between poetry and science in our politically divisive environment, but also to bring together poets writing about these subjects, in order to create a stronger, more coherent community. Many of us are reticent to share our interests (what poet isn't?) until we feel we have a common space in which to do so.

I think that poets whose work engages with the sciences (whether by way of ‘cosmic mysticism’, ‘ecocriticism’, ‘the necropastoral’, the ‘abyssal sublime’, or some other critical perspective), have a great deal to offer the sciences, not only in terms of how poetry might critique the often problematic practices of the science-focused industries, but also in terms of how poetry has the power to draw positive attention to scientific breakthroughs and ideas that have the potential to greatly enrich the human experience, combat poverty, offer us greater agency over our biology, and restore parts of the environment that industrial practices have damaged.

Although my own work can wax apocalyptic and favour the strange, the mysterious, the unknown, the horrific, the tragic, and the sublime, the vast majority of the science-inspired poetry that I read tackles science from a myriad of tonal, thematic, and narrative approaches. I’m constantly amazed by the new and different ways in which poets are approaching scientific subject matter, and I hope that this eclectic community continues to experiment and innovate.

Q: I’m always fascinated by poets who engage with science, although I’ve become less convinced over the years that the combination is as unusual as popular thought might suggest. What is it about the blending of poetry and science that still manages to maintain, in your view, such a stigma of rarity?

A: C.P Snow’s 1959 lecture The Two Cultures (later published as a short text) describes what the author perceives as a growing rift between the humanities and the sciences. Snow argues that the ‘culture’ of each department has tended to perceive the other as oddly off-kilter in linguistic, philosophical, and moral terms at best and, at worst, in outright opposition to their ‘core values’ (to skirt orthodoxical terms). Snow points out that this rift was not always so pronounced, but rather it seems to have widened sharply over the course of the 20th century.

While increased support for multidisciplinary endeavors has done significant work to productively ‘entangle’ the academic realms of the humanities and the sciences, I think that this perceived rift in academia still reflects a larger perceived rift in culture, a rift between two elements of a false binary consisting of conveniently-constructed actors of two types: those who are generally more skeptical of scientific practices and those who are generally more supportive of them.

Given the oversimplification performed by the aforementioned binary, Snow’s dialectic approach becomes less useful when tackling the question of how such spheres are overlapping today. I think that “The Two Cultures” is most useful in the sense that it encapsulates an oppositional view of science and poetry, a view that many of the poets I am interested in have been working to deconstruct.

Stereotypically speaking, poets are often seen as slaves to passion, while scientists are seen as slaves to reason. I think that these stereotypes contribute to science-inspired poetry’s “stigma of rarity,” as you put it. If one has been exposed repeatedly to these stereotypical characterizations of poets and scientists, one finds it harder to imagine the two working together or drawing from one another’s ideas; criticism is easier to imagine than synthesis.

There is a significant amount of science-inspired poetry being produced, far more than this “stigma of rarity” suggests. Ironically, Snow, in attempting to draw attention to a rift, ends up propping it open in a way by lending attention to the aforementioned false binary, to the burning of bridges rather than the building of them.

Peter Middleton’s book Physics Envy does some important work in terms of highlighting instances of overlap and idea-sharing between science and poetry in America. As recently as the mid-2010s, scholars such as Peter Middleton, Mary Migdley, Joyelle McSweeney, and others have begun to elucidate the complex relationship between science and poetry. Their work does a great deal to dispel the myth that both poetically-inclined scientists and experimental poets are few and far between.

Q: What made you approach exploring these questions and relations through poetry, as opposed to working in more traditional critical forms, such as through academic writing?

A: I appreciate the potential brevity and flexibility of poetry relative to other forms of writing. For me, creative prose and the academic essay, respectively, rely on more rigid formal scaffolding to wedge themselves into their definitions. In contrast, I see poetry as paradoxically both far less constrained by default and yet far more open to the application of customized constraints. For others, prose and the academic essay can offer the same flexibility as poetry does for me (Louis Bury’s PhD thesis Exercises in Criticism, for example, is a series of essays written according to the constraints of the texts they examine.)

Oddly enough and, I suppose, in contradiction to the previous paragraph, I have recently found myself moving towards a kind of prose-poetry in my creative work. I still strive for a certain ‘density of music’ as I’ll call it, but structurally, I've been more and more inclined to emphasize narrative in a given book, both within poems and between them. I've found that maintaining narrative in poetry offers a constraint of its own that has proven productive for me.

Speaking of forms of writing, my PhD thesis at Western will also discuss the relationship between science and poetry, giving me ample opportunity to explore the topic more thoroughly through academic writing.

Q: You’ve mentioned a couple of names and specific works so far, but have you any other models for this kind of work? What works or writers are in your head when you’re writing?

A: I have a kind of ‘critical mass’ model of writing, if you like. I gather and read through materials until I feel like I have a massive enough pile of notes for a book-length project, and then I dive into it, surfacing when necessary to fill in any gaps.

On a side-note, I also make it a priority to contribute to the design of my work; Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typography, a kind of ‘book design bible’, has been tremendously valuable to me since I bought it as an undergraduate. Christian Bök’s books of poetry, all of which he has had a hand in designing, have also served as valuable references for me over the years.

In terms of composition, if my poetry had a mother and father, so-to-speak, its mother would be Gwendolyn MacEwen and its father would be Christian Bök. When I prepare to write, I usually have both of their respective works in mind to some degree. MacEwen is also one of Christian’s favourite poets, so in a way, both he and I owe a deep debt to her. I re-read Christian’s Crystallography and MacEwen’s The Armies of the Moon every so often, but I use these texts more as launchpads than as blueprints. They warm me up by revivifying my appreciation for what poetry is capable of.

When I write, I draw from a variety of sources at once. I take a lot of notes when I read, look at, or watch relevant media, and then I go through those notes when I write. I record impressions from any media I’m exposed to, whenever something catches my eye. For example, because much of my recent work has depended upon digging through historical narratives, I’ve read through various historical texts to get a more broad sense of my subject matter.

Most recently, I’ve immersed myself in the odd and esoteric texts of the ‘UFO subculture’ in order to establish a sense of its most significant figures and events. In my current writing endeavour, Project Blue Book, I’m approaching the subjects of UFOs, alien abductions, etc. as 'modern mythologies' of sorts. I'm currently reading Carl Jung’s book Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, along with various books written by purported witnesses to events involving UFOs and extraterrestrials. Scholar Susan A. Clancy also has a book called Abducted, printed by Harvard University Press, wherein she studies abductee experiences.

Q: You reference working in terms of book-length project. What brought you to this point in your work? How did you decide that the full-length manuscript, over, say, the individual poem, would be your unit of composition?

A: Having the goal of producing a thematically coherent set of poems motivates me to write by giving me a goal to work towards. Creating a kind of conceptual scaffold that wants to be filled with poems and then struggling to fill it makes the process of writing more generative for me. This way I can also respond to material that interests me in a more detailed and complete way by making that material the subject of a book of poetry.

Q: Finally, with a small handful of poetry collections and chapbooks either in print or forthcoming, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: I can’t be certain about where I’m headed, but you could say I’m cautiously optimistic in general. So far, my chapbooks have received a fair amount of positive attention. Most importantly, these publications have put me in touch with some brilliant contemporary poets and independent publishers (Anthony Etherin and his Penteract Press, Kyle Flemmer and his The Blasted Tree, derek beaulieu and his No Press, Christian Bök and his Chronium Dioxide [Cr02] press, etc.) Given my forthcoming books, I hope that what I've written will both satisfy those already familiar with my work and also intrigue new readers.

My practice has changed significantly since I started writing seriously, in ways I’ve elaborated on earlier in this interview. I could see myself shifting into writing prose some time in future but, for the next four years, I’ll be focused on academic essays when I’m not chipping away at Project Blue Book.

Six poems from “Philip Says” appears in the nineteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “Philip Says.”

A: “Philip Says” is my half of a postcard correspondence with the poet Ada Limón. That exchange took place in 2014, and is part of a larger, ongoing project (since 2005) in which I trade a postcard-a-day each February with a different poet. My most recent collaborators were Kate Greenstreet (2017) and Noah Falck (2018). I’m exchanging postcards with David Trinidad in February 2019.

The 2014 exchange took an unexpected turn when the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman was reported. Even now, all kinds of clichés flood my language when I consider the early, unexpected loss of someone who possessed such exceptional talent and who, despite profound self-doubt, was absolutely committed to his art. “Philip Says” is rather oblique in addressing Hoffman’s death, but the poem remains an attempt to navigate grief and impermanence.

Q: How does this compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: Lately, I’ve written new poems that may or may not be included in the forthcoming book (People You May Know) and revising a group of thirty poems written this past April as part of an emailed, poem-a-day exchange with Adam Clay. The line lengths of this work are longer than those in “Philip Says,” which probably indicates my distance from studying and teaching Robert Creeley’s poetry.

Reading aloud has been essential in my writing process since the beginning and, in my more recent work, I feel I’m offering even more of myself to accuracy and how to convey it through taste: how the mouth and breath shape the poem. When trading postcards with another writer, there’s just a few hours, at most, to attempt something beautiful, and my own goals for the project include letting the language stand as a pure record of that effort, without revisions down the road. In contrast, the last poem I “finished” took nearly six weeks of revision. After many years living inside couplets, I’m more and more attracted to tercets, and I’m even more attracted (in theory at least) to the idea of letting content dictate form.

Q: What do you feel these collaborations have allowed that your solo work, at least to this point, hasn’t? More specifically, what differences have you noticed, if any, between your work as part of collaborating with Ada Limón over working with Kate Greenstreet or Noah Falck?

A: I’m suddenly suspicious of using the word “collaboration” in describing these projects, although there’s certainly a collaborative spirit in terms of commitment and simultaneity. With the postcard exchanges, I rarely have a sense of what’s going to happen in terms of shape or content until each February begins. Plus, due to the delay and general unpredictability of mail delivery, the first dispatches often don’t arrive for five, six, or seven days, so initially my collaborator and I are working blind. Still, I’ve yet to correspond with someone I haven’t met at least once, and I inevitably rely on some part of our shared history. Examples include invoking the town of Amherst, Massachusetts (where I went to graduate school with several collaborators) or the landscape where I taught last summer with Noah Falck and others at Kenyon College. And to help counter the empty mailbox and unavoidable silence that begins an exchange, I’ll start each day of the month by reading a few pages of the other poet’s most recent collection in order to associate or respond indirectly to a phrase or idea in their writing. In a more direct response to your second question, the direction of my writing in each yearly exchange is surprising, and also very much guided by my reading of, and relationship to, the other writer.

In response to your first question, the time it takes me to finish a poem (one that I’m writing on my own, without a postmark deadline) has slowed over the last few years. This isn’t a complaint as long as I’m satisfied with the end result and, should I feel discouraged by the pace of things, I need only remember that a “quick” poem for Elizabeth Bishop was one that took several months to complete. Few people understand why anyone writes poetry, and fewer people know how much time the poet spends alone, occupied inside a single memory, image, or other moment in the language. Correspondence (i.e. Postcard Poetry) offers relief from that isolation because my audience, when it boils down to it, is a single person who’s anticipating my words in their mailbox. Regardless of its shape or method, collaboration combats the solitary act of writing through intimacy and by connecting one human voice with another.

Additionally, given the frequency and time constraints established in most of my collaborative projects, the exchanges remind me that there’s no single way to write a poem. There’s also the reassurance that, yes, poets are capable of making something in the smallest window of the day. I work seriously on each postcard, knowing it’s doubtful I’ll permit revision after the fact. And although my side of each exchange settles into a consistent tone and shape, on more recent occasions I’ve given myself the project of writing a singular, month-long work. This culminated in a 174-line poem (sent to Dan Chelotti in 2016), an untitled 200-line poem (sent to Noah this year), and even a book-length sequence of 112 short paragraphs (sent to Kate in 2017).

Q: With four full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks over the past dozen or so years, how do you feel your work has developed? Where do you see your work headed?

A: As impressive as that publication history might sound, I feel like I haven’t published at all. Maybe it’s a sense that all of the poems I’ve written are working toward a single poem, the ending of which will arrive with my death. Plus, for every book I’ve been fortunate to publish, there’s another manuscript that made the finalist lists at presses X, Y, and Z, but won’t likely see the light of day. I’ve begun to wonder at what point should a writer stop letting editors decide if his, her, or their efforts are book worthy? We forgive Whitman for self-publishing Leaves of Grass. I’m no Whitman, though I’m lucky to have accumulated as much writing as I have. I’m much more interested in the poem started this morning than the one written five years ago. Our job as poets, after all, is to write the next poem.

Ultimately, I hope that each new poem will reflect a broader knowledge of the world and surprise me with its language, subject, and style. But who knows what kind of trajectory awaits. Paraphrasing a line from Noah Baumbach’s first film: you shoot for the stars and maybe you hit the roof. I won’t write a poem if its destination is already set.

Q: You mention that you’re working on a single, life-long poem. Was this something you decided early on, or was this something you realized along the way?

A: Along the way, for sure. Peter Gizzi, with whom I studied at UMass-Amherst, has described book organization and his awareness of the thread that exists between the first poem of a new book and the final poem of his previous collection. He’s not just structuring a book of poems, he’s shaping an ongoing body of work. Here, in the early decades of the 21stcentury, most of us have photographs and curate some record of our lives on social media. When I first stepped into poetry (swept up by its river, you might say), I felt the possibility of language cutting through the noise and a discrete, more accurate record of an existence. When I’m corresponding with friends, even friends who aren’t writers, I’ll sometimes include my most recent poem. For me, it’s the most accurate response to the question, “How are you?” or “How have you been?” The poem is the mental space I’ve occupied, and its creation is a genuine record of how I’ve spent my days. Then the work accumulates and, yes, ideally becomes evidence of a life.

Q: What does that mean for you in terms of building book-length collections? Do these exist as a continuous thread, or are projects constructed concurrently?

A: It’s difficult to work on more than one poem at a time, let alone book-length projects. In the last decade, I’ve tended to write in a certain mode or style (e.g. the couplet or a staggered line) before transitioning to something else. I mentioned writing very short paragraphs in my postcard exchange with Kate Greenstreet, and in a year and a half I haven’t yet returned to the paragraph form. “Philip Says” reflects, to a degree, my reading of Creeley, and my insistence on the short line (a period spanning about four years) is behind me, for now. In terms of book-length collections, that gathering of poems loosely reflects a contained period of my life and my writing. The length of time might span a month or several years. If lucky, sometimes the manuscript becomes a book, which allows me another opportunity for focused revision and re-envisioning.

Going back to style, it was odd when my last book (In Memory of Brilliance & Value) was accepted because the medium-length lines of that work preceded my exploration of shorter lines, and so I found myself struggling to reengage with a form that wasn’t in my immediate wheelhouse. It took considerable effort to reengage with poems that were several years old, though I was eventually able to remove some pieces and offer revisions to others. The origins of those poems remain firmly rooted in 2010 and also reflect my efforts five years later. I mean, Paul Valéry is credited with acknowledging that a poem is never finished (it’s merely abandoned), and with that in mind I found consolation in letting In Memory of Brilliance & Value stand as a record of the best I could do as a writer on the day my final proofs were due. I have zero desire in becoming one of those poets who regrets the past and makes changes years or even decades after the writing has appeared in a book.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: As a parent of two children, my time for reading feels smaller than ever. My library continues to grow (more slowly than it used to) and I’ve managed to extinguish most of my guilt for what I haven’t read. I’ve also grown comfortable thinking of my book collection as a partially explored library where discovery is very much alive. I’m not always intellectually or emotionally ready for the books I acquire. Our tastes as readers change (thankfully) and what sustained me in my early twenties can leave me puzzled in my early forties. There are also books I purchased five, ten, or fifteen years ago that are just now beginning to resonate. For the past several years, sober and sometimes less so, my evening ritual involves searching that library, browsing poems until I find one that hooks my attention, my affections, and then post a photograph of the poem in my social media streams. This might sound like I’m dodging your question, but I’m constantly looking for the undiscovered gem. Maybe it’s a poem by Muriel Rukeyser. Maybe James Schuyler, Gwendolyn Brooks, or a poet whose name I won’t know until I open the latest issue of a literary journal. The energy of such poems brings to mind Whitman’s dictum from Leaves of Grass: “read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life.” Poetry has accompanied the best periods of my life and served as a ballast during the worst. Poetry gives me an essential reason to live and be alive. I hate to imagine a world without the kinship of poets and their work.

Friday, November 9, 2018

robert majzels is the author of four novels, a book of poetry with Claire Huot, and numerous translations, including 5 novels by France Daigle and, with Erín Moure, several books of poetry by Nicole Brossard. He did time as an associate professor in the University of Calgary, and continues to write from time to time.

His “four verses from khArlaMoV’s aNkLe” appears in the nineteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about “four verses from khArlaMoV’s aNkLe.”

A: These four verses are part of a longer work, which I can call poetry or prose or hybrid, or mixed whatever, depending on what a particular publisher is looking for. I think we’re beginning to realize that simply adding new categories to old labels whether in genre or gender is a form of more or less aggressive normalization. Reason why I prefer to think of it all as simply writing or, if I must describe the genre i’m working in, let’s call it "twisted ankle." The language and form shift as the work shifts between narrative streams, philosophical wonderment, poetic phrasing, political rant, with bits of translational exercises (e.g. the two versions of the Wang Wei poem in the four verses), and self-reflexive wrestling with writing itself and my responsibilities as someone who writes.

The Peony Pavilion, a Kunqu opera by the 16th century Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu provides a scaffolding for kHarLaMov’s aNkLe, which follows the 55 scenes of that Ming Dynasty classic. K’s ankle is also a kind of notebook following my study of several fundamental texts of Daoism attributed to Laozi and Zhuangzi. Because writing is really always first of all reading, I’m always simultaneously writing and studying one or more texts. In the writing of a previous novel, Apikoros Sleuth, I was following the Sanhedrin Tractate of the Talmud. In this case, the near perfect stillness of the dao provides a contrapuntal slowness to the otherwise frenzied pace of the aNklE. My interest in both The Peony Pavilion and the daoist texts is of course a product of time I spent in China and the critical role of that country and culture to the future of the world. The Dao is particularly attractive to me because it suggests a sacred practice of atheism, and a refusal to present an all encompassing theory or dogma. It’s mostly about undoing our assumptions. I’m also fascinated by the daoist withdrawal from the world and refusal to act. The pull between a desire to change the world and the suspicion that it might be best to simply withdraw from it are at the root of kHarMaLoV’s aNkLe.

Formally, I’ve tried to break free of a number of traditional literary techniques. I’m working towards a form that can open up to a more rigourous social, political and literary criticism. I’ve always felt that the long argued opposition between fiction or poetry as social commentary vs formal experimentation is false. It seems obvious that structure and form, including grammar and punctuation are not rules based on some natural order, or a reflection of the “real” world; on the contrary, the formal rules have evolved in the complex power struggles between various social forces. These rules and norms determine the way we think about our selves and our lives. So writing, for me, is about challenging, exploring the limits of literary and other modes of communication to make other ways of thinking and being possible.

I’ve been working on this particular project for several years, with no expectation of seeing it in print. In a way, abandoning the idea of publication was what made it possible for me to write k’s ankle. I had to break with the discursive formation of canlit. Especially after seven years in the creative writing academic mill. I had to find a place to write without an imagined audience looking over my shoulder.

The fact it's taken me several years to write khArlaMoV’s aNkLe is perhaps ironic because the underlying theme of the work is URGENCY. Urgency in the face of environmental destruction, the military industrial complex’s permanent state of war, police racist violence, empty gestures toward reconciliation with Indigenous nations, and the complacency of the rest of us who are deadened by disaster and wasting our lives trying to earn a living. One of the principal strands woven into k’s ankle is a kind of picaresque narrative of the adventures of a group of junky anarchists who call themselves khArlaMoV’s aNkLe. The group alternates between long bouts of doing nothing on junk, when they can get it, and repeated attempts to assassinate Stephen Harper and then Donald Trump. (That’s the utopian aspect of the work — who wouldn't love to light up those bastards.)

The title refers to the Canada-Russia Summit Hockey Series in 1972 when Bobby Clarke, on instructions from the Canadian bench, broke the Russian star player Valerie Kharlamov’s ankle. In a way, that event marks a shift in the Canadian psyche. Gone is the pretence of good sportsmanship, replaced by the will to win, to own the podium. Trudeau’s smiley face may seem to be a return to happier times, but really it’s a thin mask, wagging tongue attached, concealing our active participation in a completely indefensible war on the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, conducted through unmanned drones, high altitude bombing and proxies. What the multinational manufacturers of armaments and their political puppets have come up with is a way to wage permanent war without disrupting the daily lives of their own citizens: unlike Viet Nam and the WWars before it, there’s no conscription, no rationing, no continuous return of body bags. The only disruption comes from the occasional individual suicide bomber trying to bring our war back home to us.

Q: How does this compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: It’s better.

Q: I’m fascinated by your experiments with form, from the structural resonances of Teeth to your current work-in-progress, what you’re referring to as a “hybrid.” What is it about bringing unutilized or under-considered structures into poetry or prose that you feel you wouldn’t be able to accomplish otherwise? And how successful do you feel you’ve been?

A: The big question, the chicken and egg of content/form. As I mentioned in my response to your initial question, I don’t believe that the structures and conventions of writing, including grammar, punctuation, spelling, and going all the way up to the formal rules of poetry and fiction, and especially the distinctions between genres are natural or immutable. They are constantly changing and the result of changing relations of power. We only prize symmetry over asymmetry or closure over open-endedness, clarity over ambiguity, or the phallocentric curve of so much narrative structure over the chaos in our lives because they have been drummed into us for so long. The problem with “Little Red Riding Hood” is not so much the sexist moral — young women should not wear red capes or stray from the narrow path through the woods — as the fichtean curve of the narrative structure. I remember years ago the first time I heard bebop, I told my friend who’d brought me there, “this is just noise.” He said “you’re just not ready for it.” If you listen to bubblegum music all day long, you’re going to have trouble following something more complex. Only a few years ago, the time shifts, tangled narratives, rapid cuts we see in mainstream cinema and television today would have been unthinkable.

When I was teaching, I developed an argument about experimental writing. I compared it to medicine: mainstream bestselling authors are like general practitioners; they see many patients but nothing too complicated; literary writers are like specialists; they see fewer patients but treat more complicated issues; and experimental writers are like research scientists working in the lab; they see no patients, but their work is essential to the specialists and generalists. That usually satisfied my students (though they were mostly all thinking, “please, god let me be a general practitioner”.) After dealing with writers and students for a few years, I don’t really believe in that argument anymore. It reminds me of the claim writers make in the face of the indifference of the general population to their work that canlit contributes to the economy. I certainly don't want to contribute to the economy. I think so-called “realist” writing is as accurate a reproduction of the “real" world as pornography is a true representation of sex. And the effect is similarly corrupting. It objectifies the world and shackles the collective imagination. We’ve known for a long time, for example, that iambic pentameter is not the natural rhythm of the English language, that Shakespeare’s plays were not conceived in five acts, that no one’s life actually follows the phallic curve to climax of conventional narrative structure. I agree with Nietzsche: “we are not rid of God because we still believe in grammar,” and Lynn Hejinian: “there is no need to distinguish poetry from prose.”

I think writing is as much about undoing our assumptions, disassembling the structures that limit what we can imagine about what is possible, juxtaposing what may seem to be unrelated images, phrases, words, as it is about creating anything new. When I write, I'm trying to do dreamwork. I understand the impulse to write clearly so that a progressive message can be communicated, to see writing as a kind of sugar coated pill delivering sometimes harsh medicine. But I don’t believe that’s what happens when an audience encounters the text. I support the struggle for inclusiveness and diversity, but I’m wary of the attempt to encourage tolerance and respect by simply substituting a different character in a familiar story. I don’t agree that we are fundamentally all the same. If we believe that, what happens when we encounter someone or something that is fundamentally different.

With the 85 project, I worked with Claire Huot to undo the poetic line, and the distinction between translation and original writing. With “kharlamov’s ankle” I’m trying to get rid of the literariness of writing. I want to write something that can’t be easily integrated into the pretensions and bourgeois values of the literary, with its allusive elegance, its prettiness, but at the same time not a simple flat prose. For example, the elimination of the sentence, the elimination of most punctuation (not telling the reader where to pause or striving to eliminate the deferral of meaning), the use of the period as a musical notation rather than a limit, all these open up the space of writing for me.

Q: What was it that prompted you to collaborate with Claire Huot? How did the 85 project come about?

A: Claire Huot is a sinologist by trade, fluent in reading and writing Chinese, and speaking Mandarin. She has taught Chinese studies at the Université de Montréal and the University of Calgary, published two books on contemporary Chinese culture, and served as the Canadian Embassy’s Cultural Counsellor in China. From 2000 to 2002, we lived in Beijing, where I learned some Chinese, and began to scratch the surface of Chinese culture. At the same time I was trying to find a way to write poetry out from under the boot of the line. In my research for my novel Apikoros Sleuth, I had come across a book by Marc-Alain Ouaknin entitled Le live brûlé (The Burnt Book), in which he cites a Talmudic debate over what constitutes a book. Long story short, the rabbis conclude that a book consists of a minimum of 85 letters in continuous movement (you can see the article on the website below for more how the rabbis got there). I started to write poems in 85 letters. Claire pointed out that one of the classic forms of Tang Dynasty poems, the jueju, consists of four lines (columns) of five characters each. Since a Chinese character is the equivalent of a word in English, these poems were composed of 20 words, which averages out to about 85 letters. We began a long complex, radically ethical process of translating Chinese poems into English. Our goal, in Lawrence Venuti’s terms, was to resist normalizing the poems, “to register the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text” in the translated works. In that sense, we were following Pound’s attempt to allow Chinese poetry to impact what poetry in English could become, rather than transforming Chinese into something we already recognize. In particular, by paying attention not only to the meaning of the Chinese characters, but to the radicals and phonemes contained within each individual character, we were able to explore the connotations within words as well as their literal meanings. The 85s ended up adopting various incarnations, as visual poems, stencils, video taped readings, three dimensional sculptures, and as a set of five books.

Q: What effect do you feel such an immersive project had on your subsequent work? Were you, as you suggest, able to get “out from under the boot of the line?”

A: The 85 poems combined formal rigour with a transgressive impulse. On the one hand, there was the 85 word limit, and the need to remain faithful to the source text in Chinese; and on the other hand, the resulting works moved across a variety of genres, transgressing the rules of each. My favourite incarnations of the 85s were the oral readings (which can be seen on the 85bawu website). The reading is made difficult by the layout of the poems (running down instead of across and right to left), so that it is virtually impossible to produce the usual flowing poetry reading to which we are so accustomed. The oral 85s are marked by stuttering, repetition and doubt. A sound and rhythm I enjoy very much because it enacts the relationship with another culture and language that is translation. At the same time the reader is humbled in a manner not unlike the feeling you get when you try to live in a language not your own.

The effect of the 85 project for me was twofold. On the one hand, it failed to make Claire and I rich and/or famous; at the same time, it opened up disruptive possibilities, freeing me from the constraints of commercial and academic poetics. That doesn't mean I'm against constraints or formal rigour; writing is inevitably an activity shaped by constraint. Even Bartleby the Scrivener's exquisity writing practice, standing in a corner in silence, was constrained. I just want to find new forms to reflect the world we live in and resist the tyranny of conventional thinking. "If it looks like art, it isn't art." The 85 project along with my stepping away from my brief life in academia, made it possible to write “kharlamov’s ankle,” to break with lyrical prettiness, and to include within the work its own critical component, so that it’s possible to respond to your question by citing the text:

"can we cut that insidious artful shit creeping back in after we swore we wouldn’t do that on account. of this ain’t yer litter-rah-rah-ry press sucking off the state’s tit acts just like a big press only smaller this ain’t reading in yer shithole town tonight this ain’t. yer artsyfartsy goody2shoes creeeeAtif writhing grad-you-it stewed.ent mean while. hackademics jerk off another critterical paper at one another for performance points in the annual review we were emilianO’s bandits on smack booger junior says you drop. the bombs we’ll locate targets refuel yer killing machines our dirty oil hELLo I’m bob and I’m a poet hello bob I haven’t written a poem in 24 hours some folks would say longer those marShall islanders shall we welcome them with open arms my idea any idea is a sponge only a sponge in a tsunami well… meAnwhile some boys lost their dirty jobs in the dirty oil patch concussed hockey heads broke kharlamov’s ankle joined up killed men women & children in rival oil fields overseas and all the while puffed up poets drank. cocktails with that grinning monkey of a governor-geNeral"

I wonder if there's a press out there who might be willing to publish a book like that? Probably not, but you never know. Even a publisher can occasionally be self-destructive...

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: I’ve drawn inspiration and pleasure from a range of texts over the years, but my process is less about returning to old favourites than finding and gathering together the texts that directly or indirectly inform the specific project I’m currently working on.

I mentioned above, some of the Chinese texts I was reading while working on “kharlamov’s ankle.” A starting point for the project was a concert I attended in Beijing in which an encounter between “East” and “West” was staged in the performances of a countertenor in the European Baroque tradition (Purcell, Dowland, Byrd, Handel, etc.), and a Chinese kunqu opera dan, a man playing a female role. I was immediately struck by the ambiguity and disruptive nature of the male high voice. I did some reading in those two areas, including Peter Giles’ comprehensive History and Technique of the Counter-tenor, from which I gleaned the name and story of a 16th century English countertenor who was also a spy Nikolas Morgan.

Also, at the same time, I returned to Valerie Solanas and Kathy Acker, to undercut the masculinist undercurrents in my own literary practice. I included Emily Dickinson and Emily Carr as characters in k’s ankle (all my characters since my second novel City of Forgetting have been borrowed), Dickinson because of her strange unclassifiable poetics, partly a product of her reclusive existence, and Carr because of her relationship to the world, to what, in a strange dissociation, we call “nature” and “animals”. Also, her grave happens to be across the street from where I lived during the writing of k’s ankle. I imagined both Emilys as assassins targeting Stephen Harper and Donald Trump.

Anyway, those are some of the authors and texts I read in the course of writing this project, a real hodge-podge of a bibliography. This method of research is also, of course, a form of self-education, though unlike any traditional academic curricula. I’ve not found academic approaches and structures useful, the isolation of disciplines, the divisions within disciplines, the isolation of English literature as a department separate from other national literatures, the classification of works within literature into categories invented and imposed on writing by literature’s clerks, their inflexible periodization of literature, and the inevitable exclusion of valuable marginalia that follows. I’ve seen first-hand the terrible normalizing, spirit-killing instruction of those clerks and watchdogs of literature. I won’t state categorically that it hasn’t and will never produce any literature that isn’t formulaic and boring, but it’s not for me.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Kate Siklosilives, writes, and thinks in Toronto. She is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: po po poems (above/ground press, 2018), may day (no press, 2018), and coup(The Blasted Tree, 2018) and is the co-founding editor of Gap Riot Press, a feminist experimental poetry small press.

Her poem “pentaptych” appears in the nineteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poem “pentaptych.”

A: Aside from being really really fun to pronounce, “pentaptych” is all about the contours of the co(e)ur, the heart, the place of tribunal and also romantic courting, in language. The “ptych” in pentaptych comes from the Greek ptychē (“fold” or “layer”). Using letraset, thread, and careful hands, this piece invites words to unfold and unfurl their hearts and limbs to reveal their in/sides—the barred, the sacred, the close, the far. As H.D. writes in her novel Bid Me to Live, “She brooded over each word, as if to hatch it.” For me, using letraset to create visual collages of words refracted within and without themselves is always connected with a feminine praxis, a fragile yet gilded nurturing of meaning, production as incubation, throwing words like pottery, but gently, as if listening, as if words are things we can hold up to the light or close to the ear and wait for the waves.

Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?

A: “pentaptych” relates to my other work in that lately I’m continuing to use letraset in my visual poetic practice as a means of investigating the raw materiality and inherent generosity of words in language. In this way, this work builds off my first chapbook with above/ground, po po poems, (2018), wherein I use letraset to create linguistic collages. I have also been working on some more lyric-based poetic works as of late, but going back to letraset and to visual collage always grounds me in the elemental and atomic foundations of language, as well as in the handicraft of poetry—the tactility of using my hands and handling words carefully because the medium demands it. So, while I am writing what some would say resembles more traditional poetry, I always come back to my letraset practice when I feel the need to reconnect with raw materials, get my hands dirty (my skin is literally littered with letters after a letraset making session!), and seek a playful escape from the aweful tyranny of the line.

Q: What first brought you to working with letraset? Who have your models been for this type of work?

A: I first began using letraset as a child. My dad owned a small electrical business and he used it a lot in his shop to make labels and organize inventory, so we always had it laying around the house. I used to play around with it and remember being so in awe of its transfer “magic.” After getting more into experimental visual poetry in grad school, I became inspired to use letraset again as a medium to create visual collage. I’m heavily influenced by the work of Mira Schendel, a Jewish wartime refugee, who used letraset on rice paper to create stunning visual installations that register the ghostly traces of language in a fleeting, spectral plane of possibility. I have also always admired derek beaulieu’s use of letraset in his poetics, especially in kern, which is a ridiculously beautiful collection.

Q: What do you feel working with letraset allows that might not be possible otherwise?

A: As I said, working with letraset allows for a very material and handmade poetic practice on the page that fancy computer programs can’t reproduce. The actual act of writing with dry transfer on paper or other objects (I also have pieces that use letraset on found objects such as leaves and shells) is difficult because letraset is a vintage medium that is fragile and prone to crack, break, or not transfer completely perfectly into what you might want it to be. So, there is always an element of spontaneity and having to do away with direct authorial intention because the letraset does have a mind of its own. That y you intend to place might decide, if you remove the letraset form too fast or disturb it ever so slightly, to lose its tail and be a v. And you have to accept that and move on, allowing the letters to unfold as they will. I love that it requires a unique focus and organic hand to object relationship while imperfection and chance guide the creative process.

Q: How does your letraset work compare to your more straightforward text work? Is there any overlap in consideration, or do you see them as two distinct and disconnected threads?

A: Mostly I see them as two distinct and yet interconnected threads. Both modes allow me to play and sprawl, but with a different poetic i/eye focus—one on the line(s), one on the letter(s). I’ve always seen value in going back to simplicity. bpNichol was and is huge for me in that when things get complicated, messy, unsure (I am existential AF on a good day, let’s be honest), I often go back to his work for its simplicity—not that it isn’t complex or deep, but working with elemental aspects of language has a way of bringing one back down to earth. I can get really carried away with a line in a straightforward text poem, so working with the small and simple always grounds me. And the way I get to use my hands with letraset, the way it challenges my motor skills and patience, is always a humbling and refreshing counterpart to the voluminous indulgence of the line. *in a very parental voice*: I love both equally.

Q: You’ve had a couple of chapbooks appear over the past year, all of which appear to be composed as individual projects. Do you see your work in terms of projects? And are these works self-contained, or part of some larger, as-yet-unseen pattern?

A: I’m a creature of projects. I love starting and finishing things. I also like to be doing different things in and through my work, mostly so I don’t get bored. This past year especially, I’ve been challenging myself with different materials and mediums, ways of doing and making. That’s why all three of my chaps are different and self-contained. But they all use language to fuck shit up in different ways—whether it be linear meaning, patriarchy, capitalism. I’m always working in language and finding ways to use it to disrupt, set fire, rebuild.

Q: Given your first slate of chapbooks are now in the world, where do you see your work headed?

A: That’s a good question. After completing my PhD I had a lot of pent up creative energy needing out, clearly, so it’s been a busy and fun year producing some great works with some great people. I don’t plan to slow down. I’m working on a couple bigger projects at the moment: one is a book-length experimental poetic study of the Hibernia oil field that I have been working on for some time now (the poems from may day (no press 2018) are from this collection), and one is a (re)written poetic history of my Hungarian grandparents, who fled with their children from Budapest under the iron curtain. I never got to meet them, and because of a bunch of messed up reasons, their Hungarian culture and language was lost with them and very little is known in my family about their lives. There are only gaps, a handful of facts and names, torn memories, and a lot of unspoken pain left in their wake. So I’m just now coming to know hereditary grief as a thing, and so writing through the absence of such stories with new ones of my own, as a means of re-membering, has been extremely powerful.

Q: I’m curious about your “poetic study of the Hibernia oil field.” How did this project emerge?

A: I thought you’d never ask! I’ve always been intrigued by our love/hate relationship with oil—the disputes and detest for oil companies, alongside our ever-growing desire for a life fueled by opportunity and mobility. These poems explore our complicated relationship with the oil industry in Canada through a series of experimental love poems to the Hibernia oil platform in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin off the coast of Nova Scotia. The work weaves together a global, national, and personal narrative of the oil industry in Canada. Working in an oil refinery was one of my first jobs before university, and my family has a deep history as oil and gas workers in the “Chemical Valley” of Southwestern Ontario, and they have worked aboard the Hibernia platform.

Hibernia is of particular interest to me because of its “offshore” physicality, its history of human tragedy and loss, and the complex rhetoric with which stakeholder oil companies characterize the rig, the submarine oilfields, and the risks of their business to the environment. I am interested in Hibernia as a particular place in time—the physical site of Hibernia lies in contested international waters, is privately held, bears scars of historical tragedy, land and resource rights violations, and the tempestuous sea that surrounds it is some of the roughest waters in the Northern Hemisphere.

Using cut up techniques and other experimental ways of poeming, these pieces use archival material taken from the Ocean Ranger disaster, from oil companies’ press releases, workers’ accounts, voices of resistance, legal documents surrounding offshore resource rights, and The Canada Oil and Gas Operations Act in order to salvage and bring to the surface a submerged humanity that gets lost within a rhetoric of corporate malfeasance and economic production and profit. All of these documents, reworked through and in poetry, reveal a complex cultural imaginary surrounding oil’s integral place in our national fabric, one that is deeply rooted in early pioneering mythologies of sustainability and innovation that continue to shape Canada’s identity in the present.

Q: Your Hungarian reclamation project sounds intriguing as well (I’ve been fascinated by seeing Calgary poet Helen Hajnoczky forays into exploring Hungarian language, culture and family histories over the past few years). How are you working to reclaim this lost history? How is the shape of this project revealing itself?

A: Yes, I love Helen’s work as well—especially her gorgeous Hungarian folk art pieces in Magyarazni. The shape of this project is revealing itself in a very difficult and yet very tender way. I grew up having to “understand” things about the way my dad grew up, the unspoken traumas of his and his family’s past, the way relationships were always somewhat difficult. I have always been envious of people who have close relationships with their grandparents and their family’s culture—my Hungarian background has always been so close and yet so far, so out of reach, cut off because I didn’t grow up with it and lost my grandparents before I was born. So, in the masterful words of M. NourbeSe Philip,

how does one
write
poetry from a place
a place structured
by absence

One doesn’t. One learns to read the silence/s.

I’ve only begun to learn to read these silence/s of my childhood—the quiet acknowledgements, looks, and gait of grief, the half-knowing attempts at making goulash, the meagre objects of a life, the protected heart centre where all things reside in an archive of memory. I don’t have much to work with in terms of facts or objects, proof. So much is lost. I’m reading a lot of history and folklore. I’m pouring over recipe books. I’m interrogating Hungary’s forgetting of its own past in the way it has mistreated refugees over the last couple years of the Syrian war. But mostly, I’m making it all up as I go. I’m living and writing in the broken edges of fragments. I’m experimenting with how fractured memory can create meaning in absence. I’m using poetry to forge a path not of knowing, but of imagining, of re-membering a present past.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: So much is giving me LIFE these days! I just finished an advanced copy of Dionne Brand’s new work, The Blue Clerk, which is due out very soon, and it completely devastated me in the best way. I always know I am loving a work when I’m furiously writing through and alongside it. Her work has always energized my own work in terms of its mastery of language and the way she can spin an image of human emotion so pristinely.

I return to different poets depending on my mood, what I’m writing, and how I’m feeling about the world. When the fires of beautiful resistance need stoking, I go to NourbeSe’s work, especially She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. When I need to return to simplicity and play, and get out of my head, bpNichol and bill bissett are always close by. Lisa Robertson is eternal. Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis continues to keep me up at night. Robert Duncan fuels my anarchic tendencies and desire for collective, imaginative revision.

Also, being a part of the small press community, I’m always looking at what’s emerging, what’s disrupting. As of late I’ve been loving the experimental works coming out of The Blasted Tree and Puddles of Sky Press, in particular.

Thursday, October 4, 2018

Jon Boisvertwas born in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, and now lives in Oregon. He studied poetry at Oregon State University and the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland. His first book, BORN, was published in 2017 by Airlie Press, and a chapbook, EGOCIDES, is new from above/ground press.

His poems “SNAKE,” “ECLIPSE,” “CABIN” and “BURIAL” appear in the eighteenth issue of Touch the Donkey.

Q: Tell me about the poems “SNAKE,” “ECLIPSE,” “CABIN” and “BURIAL.”

A: Snake: I grew up watching the creatures living along the small creeks of southeastern Wisconsin, and water moccasins in particular. When I began the project that became EGOCIDES, those lenses of rebirth, self-destruction and trading places opened me up to these snakes in a new way. That they are a live-birth snake rather than an egg-laying snake, and especially that they may reproduce asexually felt relevant. They aren’t just another viper: they embody questions about what it means to be a parent, child, and individual.

Eclipse: This poem expresses one of the major themes of the project, that of trading places. Through a bit of movement, a change of lighting, I become you. And don’t you expect things to be different after an eclipse? Aren’t you disappointed when the world returns just as it was? I am, and I think that disappointment reveals very old, very deep desire for magic in the sky.

Cabin: There’s a little Zen monastery in Oregon called Great Vow. I participated in a ceremony there once, where I and others whose children died very young walked into a little nearby woods and chanted and left small presents for those we’ve lost. It was fall; the sun set early, and as we all wept and left our gifts on the ground, owls began to hoot. Since then, I’ve associated the forest with letting things go. So in this project, with its cycles of creation and destruction, the forest was a pretty obvious place to visit.

Burial: Like all of these poems, “Burial” is curious about the violence in love, about two people continually undoing themselves to embrace and embody each other. This poem also borrows from some friends’ experiences of mock-burial ceremonies. Listening to their stories led me to question: if I were being pressed to death, what would come out of me? The answer was more questions.

Q: How does this work compare to some of the other writing you’ve been doing lately?

A: It’s certainly a less-populated environment than the poems in my first book occupied. In BORN, there’s a community, a lot of characters and personas. In these poems there’s you and me, and occasionally our parents, and that’s pretty much it. And there’s a lot more open space. The result, for me, is a relatively quieter collection, with room to build a more-complex relationship between the I and the you. And while there’s still some magic and some violence, the characters have agency and investment in what happens; there’s more mental and emotional activity on their part, and a bit less action.

As always, I wrote these poems, in part, to digest what’s really going on in my life, which right now is a lot of self-reflection inspired by a strong, loving relationship. But these poems also make room for my criticism of the ideas and traditions of love and marriage. Which is good. I don’t think I’d be as interested in this topic without that tension.

Q: When you say “collection”: has this grouping of poems shaped themselves into a manuscript? Given you’ve a single full-length title published, are you noticing a difference in how your second manuscript came together, compared to that first?

A: I had a big mass of poems accumulate over the last two years or so, and inside that mass maybe a third of them had a similar sound and were driven by the same feelings or events. So I put them together and started looking for an axis to line them up on. What I found was part narrative, part geography. Both are incomplete or imperfect, which I how I prefer things.

This part of the process was pretty similar to the time I spent arranging the poems in my book, BORN. Recognizing this similarity helped a lot; I could move more quickly, because I was improving upon a process rather than creating one. And, of course, the fact it’s 20 poems and not 60 made it easier, too.

I don’t really see this specific group growing into a full-length collection, though. I’ve always wanted to do something intentionally chapbook-sized, and right now I feel pretty satisfied. To have allowed myself this set amount of space to explore one thing was very fun, and being able to think of this set of poems as “finished” or “whole” has been inspiring. I feel free to move on, like maybe I’ll find another 20 poems that all go toward something else someday. This sort-of boundary or containment aspect is probably the biggest difference between writing this collection and writing BORN, even more than the difference in length.

Q: You seem to favour a variation on the American prose poem. What influences brought you to utilizing such a form, and what do you feel the prose poem allows that you might not be able to achieve otherwise?

A: Two of my favorite poets are Marosa di Giorgio and Russell Edson. Both wrote in prose-poem forms, but what matters more to me is that they wrote narratives that are at once straightforward and bewildering. Their grammar and syntax and all that stuff is really functional—it stays out of the way. Their stories, though—and their people and places—are such rich puzzles, full of magic and feelings and social critiques.

Both of these poets use a form that goes all the way to the right margin; their poems look just like paragraphs. The form I’ve been using is different. I find that using really wide margins helps me pay some attention to the words and music, as well as the story. The form still looks like a paragraph, but almost always create a four- or five-beat line. This also puts some pressure on the narrative: something should happen on each line. And using the full-justification, besides creating a visual order I like, alerts me to words that are too long. Long words create larger gaps in the line and make it harder for that line to contribute in a meaningful way. All these layout tools have really helped me develop leaner prose and quicker plots.

As for the prose poem form more generally, I think it offers writers freedom from what, to some of us, can be really distracting elements of poetry. I, for one, have a very hard time deciding where to break a line and why. There’s also something really childish and fun about taking something that’s so obviously not a poem and telling people to pretend it is. It reminds me how much of art is about perception.

Q: You mention constructing manuscripts out of groupings, sorting poems out of the pile. Is this your normal method for constructing full-length manuscripts? It suggests a curious combination of writing poems (as opposed to writing books) and constructing books. How did you arrive at this method?

A: Well, I won’t pretend I’ve got all these manuscripts sitting around. BORN is the only full-length collection I’ve successfully put together, and it took me two years to arrange that. And the early attempts look much different from the final version. I wasted a lot of time trying to isolate by topic: keeping separate spaces for poems about childhood, adulthood, Wisconsin, Oregon, my father, my son, etc. I finally saw that, if I just lay them out chronologically according to the life events that inspired them, they will make enough sense to be a book. Then I was able to finish the arrangement in a way that makes sense to me, and feels honest.

Of course, I did swap a few poems in and out—writing two new ones to bridge some gaps—with the help of editors at Airlie Press. But that part, compared to the years of struggling that came before, was very fluid. The Airlie team gave me a lot of confidence in the book, so making those small adjustments later seemed easier.

So yes, the long process I went through with BORN was a combination of chaos and intent. But the intent to write in a book-minded way didn’t come until very late in the process.

And that’s pretty much exactly what I went through with this chapbook. I had a bunch of individual poems, each written on whatever topic had my attention at the time. I looked through them all (so many times), then finally saw a thread or theme that matched up with real life, and went from there.

I’d say that this process is enjoyable, but not intentional. I’ve tried the intentionally-writing-a-book method and not succeeded. And I love those really focused, project-based books of poetry, but I just can’t do it yet. I can’t really know what I am doing in the moment; I have to dig through it all afterward.

Q: If the individual poem is your preferred unit of composition (over the chapbook, or the full-length collection), how does a poem usually begin?

A: I have two common starting points.

In one, the first lines come first. I don’t know where they come from, but they arrive as sort-of just having potential, rather than having a clear point. For example, a very new poem I am working on begins, “I put a microphone on top of a cactus.” I don’t know where it came from, but I feel like it has potential: it’s giving me a landscape, a character, and some kind of desire. So from there, finishing the poem means unraveling the mystery in this first line.

In the other, I have a feeling I want to write about, but which is hard to describe. So I try to create a short scene or bit of action which I think captures it. In BORN, there’s a poem called “Elephant” that came about this way. Initially, I wanted to write about losing contact with an alcoholic parent. This is a complicated experience, and very surreal. So what fit, for me, was a story of a man crawling into an elephant’s belly and the elephant running away. One reason this fits for me is that it’s not that the father leaves; his intentions are something else. But a force much larger than him—one that also captures other men’s attention as well—takes him.

I use these two methods pretty much equally, and have been for maybe eight years now. I think I’m ready to try something else soon, though.

Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?

A: Again, Marosa di Giorgio and Russell Edson. I was very glad when Ugly Duckling Presse released a new translation of a bunch of di Georgio’s work, I Remember Nightfall, which is terrific. I love going back to her poems because they create and exist in a very complete, unique world. So do Edson’s. Other contemporary books I feel accomplish this are CAConrad’s The Book of Frank, Lisa Ciccarello’s At Night, and all of Aase Berg’s books in English. I’m sure there are many more I am not remembering or don’t know about, though (and maybe you have some recommendations?).